Security issues and other motivations for surveillance continue to drive wide scale deployment of systems that can provide monitoring in vehicles, buildings, parking lots and other areas. In some of these systems it is necessary to transmit acquired information to central monitoring locations, emergency response vehicles or to other devices. It is also the case that in some situations, it would be advantageous to have the ability to provide remote monitoring or access to non-party entities. Such non-party entities include law enforcement or emergency service agencies. Current systems are typically closed systems and tend to have proprietary communication schemes and thus provide limited access to data. These closed systems do not lend themselves to scalable widespread deployment or provide the opportunity for open access communication.
It is desirable to have a system that can acquire a wide variety of multi-media and environmental data, and secure such data so that it can be transmitted over a communication channel that may not have a large bandwidth. More specifically, it is desirable to have a system that enables wireless transmission of audio/video information to provide a more complete impression of a particular scene or emergency situation. Even further, it would be advantageous to have the ability to share among response units that are present at the scene of an incident, data that has been acquired by the first responding unit or any of the other response units in the vicinity.
While there are existing devices that transmit “live” over the internet or at least reasonably close to real-time, the vast majority of these devices are not of a commercial grade and thus tend to lack the resolution, security or refresh rate that would meet the demands of a satisfactory real-time streaming of video monitoring/surveillance systems for law enforcement. Even further, these devices are not suitable for, nor do they provide means for, enabling video streaming from one patrol car to other units.
There exists a need for a system that will provide improved data compression and networking capability for monitoring systems without necessitating large memory usage or large computational powers.
Existing technology in the realm of video surveillance and the application of such technology to enhance law enforcement or address and/or enhance law enforcement or emergency response functions have been very limited. This is particularly the case in the wireless arena and more specifically with respect to wirelessly sharing video data in real-time between response units at a scene. It would be advantageous to make data that is available to one mobile response unit, also available to others at the scene. Based on current practices and technology, when a patrol car for example has video or other multimedia data, that data at best can be transferred via some portable media, such as Digital Video Disk, Video Cassette Recorder tape, Compact Disk or in some instances a removable drive. Attempts to provide such information using technologies such as the internet or other network schemes have been limited for a number of reasons.
In order to stream video over the internet or any network a number of issues relating to the fact that these networks were not originally designed for streaming technologies need to be resolved. For example, because the internet is a shared medium that utilizes a best effort delivery mechanism, i.e. Internet Protocol (IP), to deliver content, it is not natively conducive to video streaming. The internet has no dedicated path between a source node and a destination node, thus packets of data are routed independently to the destination and may arrive in random orders, which would affect video streaming. Even further, the limited bandwidth of the internet connection may also present a bottleneck in video delivery. As such, much effort has gone into compressing data for video streaming. Some of these issues are further compounded when the connection between the source and destination involves wireless links.
What is needed is on-the-scene video capture and data sharing. In other words, one police squad car may acquire video data from an in-vehicle camera or other source that is pertinent to all responding units. The ability for the officer in that squad car to view and share what is being acquired with other officers at the scene or back at the precinct would enable tremendous collaboration, coordination, support and oversight. Ordinarily, patrol/squad cars or other emergency response units communicate and exchange audio information. The ability to also share visual information in real-time would provide some significant advantages as earlier identified. An efficient and timely exchange of information in the field would also enhance officer safety, situation assessment, response times and the resolution of problematic situations.